10. Little Round Top on the Gettysburg battlefield
In the early 1990s, media mogul Ted Turner, a longtime fan of films about the American Civil War, participated in the production of the film Gettysburg. Turner insisted on realism, and the production company managed to obtain permission from the National Park Service to use Civil War re-enactors from all over the country to film scenes of the battle on the actual battlefield in Pennsylvania. During the preparations for the filming of the second day of the battle’s struggle over the hill known as Little Round Top, re-enactors in Union uniforms gathered at the crest of the hill where the scenes would be filmed. Several of them encountered a bearded man in the garb of a Union soldier who distributed cartridges, of the paper type used for muzzle loading firearms, consisting of black powder and a minie ball. The re-enactors assumed the man was part of the production company.
It quickly became evident that the ammunition being distributed was not blanks for the use of filming, but live rounds. Some of the rounds were later examined by forensic experts and found to be comprised of powder, ball, and paper, dating from the time of the Civil War. None of the re-enactors present recognized the man who had distributed the rounds, and he was not seen again. Whomever had been the man determined to see that Little Round Top was again adequately defended has never been established. The story is just one more of literally hundreds of tales of hauntings and strange paranormal events which surround the Gettysburg battlefield and the town itself, some of which even predate the three day cataclysm of July, 1863.